


The Last Challenge

by shewhoguards



Series: The Last Challenge [1]
Category: The Prince of Egypt (1998)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:12:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewhoguards/pseuds/shewhoguards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At two, Rameses thought all babies arrived in baskets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Challenge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mari4212](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mari4212/gifts).



At two, Rameses thought all babies arrived in baskets. It seemed reasonable - in fact, when he was seven and heard the real explanation, baskets still seemed a more likely explanation. Which was more likely - that his formidable father and his cool, calm, collected mother should have taken off all of their clothes and actually touched each other, or that he’d arrived in a basket on the tide one day?

It didn’t make him like Moses any more. It did make him somewhat more wary of baskets. For a time he approached all of them with caution, in case they discharged another wailing, attention-hungry sibling. Worse, some nights he woke from dreams where he’d done something terrible and his mother’s hand-maidens had placed him carefully back in a basket and let him loose to drift on the river while his mother cooed over the baby.

His mother took it calmly when she caught Rameses trying to stuff Moses head-first into a basket. His mother had taken a new-born arriving from nowhere calmly, it wasn’t in her nature to get over-excited easily.

“Moses is a very special baby,” she told him gently. “He’s been sent from the gods for us to enjoy, and you do not turn away - or mis-treat - gifts from the gods. But you, Rameses, my little sun, you will be the morning and the evening star, yours will be the power that brings the sun up on a morning. With so much power, it is good for you to have one person who will never be afraid to love you for who you are, and not what you are.”

Later, much later, when he had his own small son curled in the crook of his arm, Rameses wondered over that. Had his mother somehow not known about the hundreds of slave babies killed, had his father not wondered where the tiny baby had come from when his wife showed no sign of pregnancy? What had inspired them to know that and look away? Were they truly so convinced it was a sign of the gods, or was it concern for the boy they already had, an attempt to stop him from becoming isolated in his loneliness once they were no longer there?

Had they known what Moses would become, would they have acted differently? That much, Rameses could not doubt. Ah, but had there been a way to know, would Rameses have had them act differently? That was a harder question.

Anger in the here-and-now could not erase the years as boys, once Moses had got past the annoying, screaming stage. Rameses was the small sun, the boy who would be Pharoah, but Moses was never afraid of him. The only person who was never afraid of him - even the priests alternated on trying to get on his good side when they were not running to his father with tales of his misbehavior. Rameses shouted and tantrumed, Moses made faces at him. Rameses gave him orders Moses pretended to obey them, in the most painfully wrong way possible. Rameses tried to make him run messages. Moses delivered them, interpreted so as to be positively insulting, and then hid, giggling, to listen to the explosive result.

Threatening to have him whipped or executed made him laugh. Scuffling with him was as like to bring them both up in front of the Pharaoh in disgrace - from the age of three, Moses could give as good as he got in a fight, helped by the fact that he wasn’t afraid to bite Rameses’ royal person. Faced with such an infuriating lack of respect, an inability to understand that Rameses had authority over him, and even his mother refusing to admit that Rameses should be more important than some snotty little baby, the only thing to do was laugh with him. Even years later, Rameses missed the laughter. When Moses went away, no-one laughed with him any more, and the only thing left for him to do was grow up.

He resented Moses for that, far more than he resented Moses’ outrageous demands. Moses always made outrageous demands - it was what he did. Outrageous demands, outrageous deeds, outrageous rudeness - and then collapsed in laughter if Rameses was wound to the point where he exploded in outrage. But leaving had been more than outrageous, it had been unfair. It had left Rameses with no-one to confide in, no-one who understood that sometimes the role he was to step into was sometimes more terrifying than inviting, and no way to escape from the fact that one day all of these people, all of Egypt, would depend on him.

Once he’d wondered at his father’s ability to order so many babies killed. He’d understood why it had to be done, but being able to follow it through with such chilling calmness made his father seem barely human - but then, as a child, he’d rarely thought of his father as human anyway. Now as an adult, as Pharaoh, he understood. Pharaoh was a parent, and all Egypt made up his children, from the doddery old men to the tiniest babies. He must be stern, as his father had been stern with him, to train them to be their best selves but he must also protect them from any threat, however innocuous. And babies could be a threat, if there were enough of them.

Moses wasn’t a threat though. Not Moses, with his stupid long hair and beard and equally stupid demands. Moses wasn’t even a warning. Just a joke, there to see how far he could push his brother, not realising that the Pharaoh was not allowed to laugh any more. Not since he left.

The first plague was disgusting, but not frightening. Rameses had grown up with priests and their cheap tricks and it took more than that to frighten the Pharaoh. He ignored it, hoping it would be enough for Moses to drop the nonsense and desist.

The frogs were harder to explain. Coincidence maybe - but a strange coincidence. Maybe they’d been upset by their homes turning red. Maybe maybe maybe.

By the time it got to the insects, Rameses was getting seriously annoyed. A joke was a joke, and perhaps while Moses had been away he’d been staying with new friends who had encouraged these strange ideas. He needed to understand that Rameses wasn’t his brother any more but Pharaoh, a god people were afraid of, a man he needed to respect.

But Moses had never been afraid of Rameses, not ever, and he’d known precious little about respect in the time Rameses had known him.

He set his teeth and ignored one plague after another, refusing to give Moses the reaction he was looking for, hardening his heart to his people’s cries for help. Give in to this and Moses would be along with some other demand, more foolish than the last. Better to wait it out, let Moses run out of his silly tricks and then it would be over. With anyone else he would have had him killed by now, without a second thought but.. it was Moses. And there his thought processes stopped. He wouldn’t give in to him, but how could he hurt the one person who’d never believed he would?

And yet he was so, so sick of this.

A hundred times Rameses called it done. A hundred times he laughed, and gave in to Moses’ games. A hundred times he saw Moses grin in response and drop the matter, admitting he’d only wanted to win. A hundred times..

Pharaoh didn’t give in once. Pharaoh never could.

Nor could he weep as he watched Moses walk away, there was nothing in Pharaoh that allowed that kind of softness. He could only console himself with the idea that what was true for him must also be true for Moses. If he could not hurt Moses for the sake of brotherhood known and lost, nor, surely, would Moses sabotage that memory with any true hurt, no matter what he said or threatened.

It took the death of his son for Rameses to realise that assumption had been wrong, and that not just his child, but his brother too was lost forever.


End file.
